practice

Reaching beyond caring to loving in child and
youth care practice - I

Abstract: This article presents a brief look at
incorporating the act of loving into the professional helping
relationship that is created in child and youth care practice. The
differences between the act of caring and the meaning of loving are
discussed. Through an exploration of the author’s relationship with a
child, the dangers of loving “including the expectations of acceptance
of the love being given, expectations on the child to feel love, using
love as a reinforcer, and love leading to burnout “are discussed. A new
way of loving in child and youth care practice that allows for the
inclusion of loving in the helping relationship is explored and
experienced by the author. Implications for incorporating love in child
and youth care practice are discussed.

I have often wondered if I
care “too much.” The cautions and reminders of getting hooked on other
people’s problems, or trying to “save” someone are always present in the
educational forum where I presently am learning about child and youth
care practice. I have noticed that we rarely discuss loving the
individuals we work with, and if a colleague does venture to that
forbidden place of loving a client, I find myself thinking, “Oh, she’s hooked.”

The expectation that I
demonstrate the act of caring is obvious, yet to reach the place of
loving is scary. There are fears that are triggered when I think about
expressing the loving part of my Self to the world in personal or
professional relationships: fears of hurt or inevitable abandonment if I
show that side of my Self, or fears that loving another person will mean
that I have to give up a part of my Self and be inundated by that
person. The definition that I have created regarding love has allowed me
to face these fears of abandonment and inundation. Yet this definition
has not truly opened itself to being able to express love in practice.
We have yet to study how to love the children, youth, and families we
work with. What does loving a child we work with mean? What are the
dangers of love and is it really appropriate in the professional helping
relationship? If I am to go beyond caring to loving in my practice, what
will I need to do to make sure my work remains effective? In this
article I examine the differences between caring and loving, the dangers
of different types of loving, and loving in child and youth care
practice through the exploration of a caring and loving relationship I
have with a child I work with.

What is means to care
The title of “child and youth care practitioner” itself suggests a
relationship in which the main characteristic is the act of caring.
Caring can be seen as “a close attention, liking or regard, to protect
or to look after” (Mayeroff, 1961, as cited in Denholm, 1990). Mayeroff
also looks at the following criteria as part of the act of caring:
knowing another’s needs and being able to respond; showing an ability to
alternate one’s rhythm to maintain or modify one’s behaviour in order to
help another; demonstrating patience, honesty, and trust; instilling
hope in order to promote growth and courage to face the unknown; having
a willingness to learn without arrogance; and possessing humility. These
tasks involved in demonstrating the act of caring from the practitioner
can be seen as what essentially makes the profession unique. The
wonderfully clear definition of the act of caring appeals to my desire
for knowledge regarding exactly what the profession I have chosen in the
child and youth care field means. It gives a sense of an objective and a
purpose and allows for clarification to those who so often question, “What is a child and youth care worker?”

Caring moves beyond being “good with kids” or being able to play floor hockey. It requires the
skillful exploration of the meeting of selves between the worker and the
child. The child and youth care practitioner can be seen as being
required to bring their Self to their work. So often we define people by
their chosen profession “be it a firefighter, a nurse, or a lawyer. The
child and youth care practitioner could easily be labeled a “Self,” for
that is the tool and the briefcase that the practitioner brings to the
work. In order to respond and be present with those we work with, we
must bring to work various aspects of our Self, which include our
knowledge, our patience, our trust, our honesty, our experience, and our
openness for learning, which essentially is the caring. When I have at
times let the child or youth know I care about them, the response has
been quick. “You only care because it’s your job!” Yes, it is my job to
care, and how I fulfill that requirement can determine how effective I
am in practice. How I choose to bring my Self into my practice could
quite possibly determine how effective I am in the work. It is
impossible to fully bring this tool to work without understanding and
having an awareness of how it operates in practice. This exploration may
take years, months, practice, experiences, and education to be fully
reached. Once child and youth care practitioners have ventured to that
place, know where it is, and know how to draw each part of their core
Self into practice, they can fully embrace the profession and have an
experiential understanding of the demands that they themselves are
placing on the individuals they work with, healing the child within
(Whitfield, 1989).

Going beyond caring,
to loving
Yet how far do child and youth care workers have to go in caring for
their clients? Does caring include loving? If I were to describe myself
as a child and youth “love” practitioner, I would most certainly raise
some eyebrows. I imagine colleagues would be quick to raise the issue of
boundaries and question my motives behind loving. Can I have, then, a
boundary and still love?

I struggled when initially
addressing this question of whether or not there is a potential to love
the children, youth, and families we work with, as I saw love as being
personal and not a part of my Self that I would express in the
professional world. I believed love to be a two-way street, only really
true if it was reciprocated by the person I was in relationship with. If
it was not true, not reciprocated, there would be a sense of loss.
McKeen and Wong (1991, p. 74) describe this kind of love that is based
on reciprocation as a “need ... that must be filled, else that person is
in danger of depletion.” There was a sense that if I loved, then I was
giving a piece of my Self that would be lost if love was not returned.
With this reciprocal love in mind, I would easily dismiss the idea that
child and youth care practice was to include love, for it would be based
on the condition that it was expected of the client. The kind of love
that I would be faced with demonstrating to my clients (if I were to
include it) would need to be unconditional and not based on their
success or failure, their love for me or for others, or how they treated
me or others.

Is this possible? “Most
people are unable, fortunately, to turn their love on and off” (Krumboltz & Krumboltz, 1972, p. 13). I am like most people, and thus I
questioned how appropriate it was to love in helping relation ships that
can be so brief, so constrained by outside influences, and essentially
directed by the client who may or may not wish me to love them, or even
to care. The kind of love, then, that I must ultimately demonstrate if
I’m to include it in my practice, needs to be able to withstand
rejection. I believe that I could continue to care, and have continued
caring, in the face of rejection, although rejection of love, when it is
brought from the Self, appears to me to be more difficult. And of course
the question arises of what happens when we are no longer there? Our job
changes, a move happens, the child leaves, our time allotted for service
is up. What then? I have always believed that loving included a
commitment, and defined that commitment in terms of amount of time. It
is difficult to imagine how I can love for only six weeks, let alone for
a quick intervention of an hour.

Yet is it possible? I
questioned how ethical it was to include love in our profession due to
the fact that we are being paid. I have worked with children and youth
previously, and I realized that everyone who “cares” or “loves” them in
their life was paid to be there. Can that be considered unconditional?
The recent strike of a number of human service professionals in British
Columbia, Canada, demonstrated how it was a priority for practitioners
to receive appropriate payment for their services. The care we give, and
potentially the love we give, can thus be considered conditional. So,
inevitably, the question of going beyond the profession of caring to
include with it the energy of loving once again arises.

Dangerous love
The dangers of loving are easily found in my own professional and
personal experience. One child in particular speaks to my fears of
loving. When I went beyond the act of caring and began to love, the
relationship became far more meaningful in my life, and I believed that,
through time, it would in the child's life also. Through that level of
relationship, I thought that change and healing would be able to occur,
as “indeed love is the most healing of our resources” (Whitfield, 1989,
p. 133). I initially saw myself loving the child while faced with
physical violence, abusive language, and daily tensions. I faced the
confrontations and the struggles with the energy of love, which for me
at the time was defined by my beliefs around commitment and
reciprocation as being a part of loving. The love that I had for this
child went beyond my occupational requirements of progress reports and
case conferences. The act of caring was always a part of the
relationship, yet I saw this as the professional side of my job. To love
this child, for me at that time, meant that I was committed and “in it
for the long haul.” I read the case files, heard the child's story,
spoke with previous foster parents, and became enveloped in the tragic
tale. I had entered dangerous ground in how I defined the love I had for
him, as I was hooked. Barends and Harper (1999) speak directly to the
attempts I had begun making to give the child the love I believed he was
owed. My love, then, became conditional as I expected him to accept the
love I was giving. In my choice to go beyond professional caring and to
show my love to this child, I was challenging him to recognize and
accept the lack of love he had received from others. “The child cannot
easily understand how you are able to care, when the most important
people in his life have let him down” (Barends & Harper, 1999, p. 2).

How vital that realization
is! It took a lot of time to bring to my awareness how irreplaceable is
the love, acceptance, and attunement in the initial relationship the
child had with his mother. In portraying my definition of love as being
reciprocal and therefore needing to be accepted and involving a
commitment, I was also expecting the child to face that others may not
have loved him if he accepted my definition of what that meant. He
could, in essence, believe that he could no longer love his mother, for
in his view, it was not reciprocal, nor was she committed to an amount
of time with him, which would follow my definition of loving. I believed
that I was giving the child what he really needed. Love was my mode of
intervention, yet I neglected to consult him regarding his perceptions
of his wants and his needs. I neglected to discover and explore his own
definition of loving and invite him to bring that to the surface.

From his developmental
history, and reflecting now on my experience with him up to that point,
I believe he had taken on the stance that “I will reject love, no matter
who gives it to me” (Gravitz & Bowden, 1985, as cited in Whitfield,
1989). Possibly this rejection was more about my definition of love that
I had presented to him at the time. Gravitz and Bowden also state that
with this stance of rejecting love that is given, the child may continue
to have difficulty experiencing feelings and emotions, including love.
My showing this kind of love, then, conflicted with his experience of
the love I gave to him. He was told through my love that he had to
accept it from me, the child and youth care worker, as opposed to
someone else, and had to actually feel the love I gave him. This
inevitably was a large burden for this young child to carry. One of the
dangers of love, then, is the expectation that can be placed on children
we work with and the omission of an invitation to bring their own style
and definition of loving into the world.

Another danger in
incorporating love into child and youth care practice is using it as a
reinforcer. If I choose to include love, and potentially to express the
loving part of my Self through hugs and statements, these need to be
consistent and authentic. The consistency of love needs to be evident as
children watch and may be invited by the child and youth care
practitioner to express their own loving part of their core self. Love,
and the expression of it, cannot be given as a reward based on the
achievements or strides the children have made toward their goals. The
child who asks for a good-night hug from the staff at the group home
needs to receive it regardless of the window they broke or the milk they
split. Learning that love comes only after “good” behaviour is teaching
the child that love is payment and is conditional, for “if we use love
as a reinforcer, we must be prepared to withhold it just as readily as
we grant it” (Krumboltz & Krumboltz, 1972). Withholding or granting love
is also described by McKeen and Wong (1991) in their belief that “often
love is treated as though it were a commodity, something that could be
exchanged or bartered, or withheld and used for ransom or control.” I
was discovering that the expression of loving from the core Self that we
can incorporate into practice as child and youth care practitioners must
be beyond expectations, acceptance, conditions, and commodity.

Through time with the child I
was working with, I discovered that the expectations of acceptance of
the love I was expressing, and the child having feelings of being loved,
were unrealistic at the time. This is not to say that this child will
never reach acceptance, feeling and hopefully expressing his own loving,
for he will continue to grow and change through our continuing
relationship and the future relationships he is involved in. As I faced
the fact that my expectations for the child would be unmet, I also
realized that I began to show signs of burnout. The definition I had
created around love had drawn out my fears of loving. The love in the
relationship was not reciprocal, nor accepted, by the child. I had
believed that if I loved him in this way, he would be filled up with
that love and change would occur. Yet the child did not reciprocate, nor
accept, the love as I had defined it. Changes had occurred, but I began
to discount the positives that the child was demonstrating in his life
and magnify the negatives when they occurred. The child had worked
incredibly hard to go from one hour a day at school to full days, yet if
homework was not completed, consequences were quickly given.

I began to over-organize and
work harder on the child's needs. The amount of energy I spent in what
had started out as love, but was now more directed toward my own needs,
led to an inevitable burnout and a leave of absence which shifted the
relationship between the child and myself to something completely
different.

By the time I returned, the
child had realized that I was not a permanent fixture in his life and
that I, like others, would, could, and at times should leave. This shift
in physical presence as a demonstration of loving challenged the initial
definition of love that I had presented to him. My initial definition
considered commitment of time and being “in it for the long haul” as
important expressions of love. My absence raised questions concerning
how to be loving when being physically present is not an option. The
demands that had come with the definition of love that I had in the
beginning of my involvement with the child had not allowed the meeting
of Selves as two connected individuals to occur. I had been depleted,
not from loving, but rather from fighting for the expectations I had
placed on myself and the child. Trying to replace the love that had been
missed in the child's earliest relationships, being “committed” to be
physically present for the child all the time, and the game of
reciprocation had emotionally exhausted me. I had lost my boundary and
had forgotten my Self in the process. Re-entering the home was different
for me. I also realized that I wasn’t permanent and that the love that I
had attempted to demonstrate in the past, and my “in it for the long
haul” attitude, was not going to “save” him. There was no requirement
for me to “fill him up” with the love that I believed he had lost in his
primary relationship with his mother. Yet the absence of loving in my
relationship with this child was not an option for me. Expressing that
part of my core Self was a joyful way of being that I had experienced in
brief moments in relationship. A shift in my “love mode” of intervention
slowly occurred as I sought out a new way of being loving that was
without cost or expectation.